English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719), a story of a man shipwrecked alone on an island，Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel, along with Samuel Richardson. Before his time stories were usually written as long poems or dramas. He produced some 200 works of nonfiction prose in addition to close 2 000 short essays in periodical publications, several of which he also edited.
Defoe
was one of the first to write stories about believable characters in realistic
situations using simple prose. He achieved literary immortality when in April
1719 he published Robinson Crusoe, which was based partly on the memoirs
of voyagers and castaways, such as Alexander Selkirk, who spent on his island
four years and four months. The first edition was printed in
At first Defoe had troubles in finding a publisher for the book and eventually received £10 for the manuscript. Employing a first-person narrator and apparently genuine journal entries, Defoe created a realistic frame for the novel, which distinguished it from its predecessors. The account of a shipwrecked sailor was a comment both on the human need for society and the equally powerful impulse for solitude. But it also offered a dream of building a private kingdom, a self-made Utopia, and being completely self-sufficient. By giving a vivid reality to a theme with large mythic implications, the story have since fascinated generations of readers as well as authors like Joachim Heinrich Campen, Jules Verne, R.L. Stevenson, Johann Wyss (Der schweizerische Robinson), Michael Tournier (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique), J.M. Coetzee (Foe), and other creators of Robinsonade stories.
At
the age of 62 he published MOLL FLANDERS, A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR and
COLONEL JACK. His last great work of fiction, ROXANA, appeared in 1724. Defoe's
choice of a female protagonist in Moll Flanders reflected his interest in
the female experience.
Defoe's
father had stayed with his older brother Henry in
